04 July 2013 7:21 PM

Take shorter showers? Let's just shut down the Energy Saving Trust instead

Worrying news today, all on
the BBC.

First off, it
seems the United Nations says we have had the hottest few years the planet has
experienced, ever. Up until 2007, anyway.

All right, it
has been a bit cooler since then, but the Corporation had a reporter in Death
Valley to tell us it was still very hot there, and, after all, he informed us,
it’s the extremes that count.

Personally, I’m
not planning to live in Death Valley, partly because I have suspicions about
how it got its name. During the California Gold Rush of 1849, if you must know.

But since we
have now been assured that the BBC is no longer biased to any degree, we must
take these climate change warnings at face value.

Then we had
someone on the radio saying all the orangutans in Indonesia are being wiped
out because all the forests are being felled to make room for palm oil
plantations.

The Today
Programme didn’t seem to have much interest in exploring why the forests are
being cut down to produce palm oil, so let me help. Palm oil is used to make
biodiesel, which fuels buses and so on around the Western world, because
governments encourage it.

But why do
governments encourage it?

Because the green lobby, a decade ago or so, told
them to, because it would save the planet. Tony Blair’s government was all for
it, urged on by Friends of the Earth, Guardian columnists and so on.

Oh well, you
can’t get everything right.

We have to
concentrate on what we can do to save the planet today, which is to put less
water in the kettle and take shorter showers.

This advice is
provided by the Energy Saving Trust, which is reported by the BBC, in all
seriousness, as saying that three quarters of all households overfill their
kettles and this wastes £68 million a year.

Based on a study
of 86,000 homes, it also said that the average shower takes seven and a half
minutes and if people got out of the shower a minute earlier it would save us
£215 million.

The study turns
out to be based on answers to an online questionnaire. I’m sure it’s all very
properly done with very tight controls and sound methodology. Even so, you
would have thought there was room for a little scepticism about how overfilling
kettles costs us all £68 million a year, as opposed to, say, £66 million, or
£36 million, or double the number you first thought of.

To give the
Energy Saving Trust credit, it does mention this, in the small print that the
BBC failed to report.

It turns out
that the 86,000 figure is what you get when 100,000 questionnaire replies have been
‘cleansed’ to remove ‘irregular’ answers. Then, as the BBC didn’t mention, that
86,000 was more than halved again to under 39,000 after answers that were not
‘fully explicit’ were removed.

Then, the Trust said: ‘The data points collected
were self-reported answers to closed questions, and we recognise that there are
a number of potential biases present in this type of approach. Where
possible we have sought to evaluate our results against recognised benchmarks
and this has revealed strong validity. These are aspects which we hope to
explore further in Phase Two.’

You get the picture.

I don’t blame
the Energy Saving Trust for coming up with pretty rounded figures, because
sometimes hard and accurate numbers can be very difficult to get hold of.

As an
example, let’s take the salaries of senior executives at the Energy Saving
Trust. Let’s start with the pay of chief executive Philip Selwood and chairman
Ted Brown.

Here is what the
Trust says: ‘We are not a public company and as such don’t prepare a separate
remuneration report/details of salaries. Details
of remuneration paid are in our accounts which are filed annually at Companies
House.’

Or, broadly
translated, go to hell.

Personally,
I think life is too short to spend time and money checking out the salaries of
these characters, and of course I would hesitate to add to the world’s deadly
cargo of carbon dioxide by schlepping down to Companies House.

You will just
have to make an informed guess, pretty much like the Energy Saving Trust did
when it calculated the money that is wasted boiling kettles.

You might think,
however, that this is all about as transparent as the tap water in a fracking
zone. We are supposed to live in an age when highly-paid public officials can
no longer keep their salaries secret.

Public
officials? Didn’t the Energy Saving Trust say it wasn’t a public company?

Yes, it did, but
that doesn’t mean for a minute that it lives off its own money.

The Trust has
published an annual review for 2011/12, which is astonishingly short on
financial information but which does have a page on ‘our funding’.

This comes down
to: Department of Energy and Climate Change, £28,468,419; Welsh Government
£1,528,990; Department for Transport £3,584,164; Scottish Government
£19,614,670; other £4,966,452.

There are
no details at all on where the other bit comes from. We’ll all just have to
guess again. The only solid thing we can tell is that, in the financial year
2011/12, the Energy Saving Trust took well over 90 per cent of its £58 million
funding, north of £50 million, from the taxpayer.

Nice work if you
can get it.

My proposal is
this. Instead of saving £50 million of that wasted £68 million by filling our
kettles less full, let’s make as much tea as we like. Instead we can save £50
million a year by shutting down the Energy Saving Trust.

Share this article:

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

We have the Energy Saving Trust and we have the Carbon Saving Trust both effectively government Quangos and both doing exactly the same thing. If we want to save money we could close at least one and not notice the difference.

Typical right wing "short-termism" - save in the short term to spend in the long term! When the Energy Saving Trust is succesful we can save THAT £50 million as well as saving all the other £50 millions along the way and ever after!!! The BBC is - as ever - calling these things correctly in the longer term

Post a comment

Comments are moderated, and will not appear on this weblog until the moderator has approved them. They must not exceed 500 words. Web links cannot be accepted, and may mean your whole comment is not published.